What Is The Point Of Daylight Savings Time?

It is springtime again as i write this article and it is time again for me to get up on a ladder and climb up to my big clock on the wall and turn it over one hour. Have you ever wondered why we bother to do this? Well as it turns out there is more than one reason. The biggest one that is usually given is that it saves energy. How does it do that you might ask? Well the government says that by increasing the number of daylight hours in a persons workday it saves energy because things like the street lights in the city don't have to come on as early and they don't have to stay on as long. People driving in their cars don't have to turn on their headlights as early and it saves them energy and money. It also helps with traffic safety. There are fewer auto accidents in the daylight hours than at night because drivers can see better so it actually saves lives as well. It also reduces crime. Criminals prefer committing crimes at night it seems so with fewer night time hours available to them they commit fewer crimes. Probably the biggest and best reason of all is that it provides the public with more daylight hours after work so they can go out and shop or go dine or engage in other after work activities so it is also actually good for certain industries like retail and restaurants. The original reason for daylight savings time was in order to provide farmers with more daylight hours to work their farms and grow more food and it still does this.

So How Do You Spell That Libyan Guy's Name?

While the people of Libya struggle to remove a dictator that has ruled over their country for over 40 years the media in the United States struggles to figure out exactly how to spell his name properly. As it turns out there is no one correct way to do it but several hundred ways it seems. The problem is that there are no exact letters or equivalent sounds in English for spelling several parts of his name ergo you get the numerous variations. Here are just some of the many different spellings that I came across in researching this article on how to spell that guy's name, what's his face:

• Muammar Qaddafi



• Mo'ammar Gadhafi



• Muammar Kaddafi



• Moammar El-Kadhafi



• Muammar Qadhafi



• Moammer El-Kazzafi



• Moamar Al-Gaddafi



• Muammar Al-Qathafi



• Moamer El-Kadhafi



• Muammar Qadafi



• Moamar Gaddafi



• Mu'ammar Qadhadafi



• Mu'ammar Al-Qadhafi



• Muammar Quathafi



• Muammar Al-Khaddfi



• Mu'ammar Al-Qadhdhafi



• Mu'amar Kadafi



• Muammer Gheddafi



• Muamar Khadafy



• Muammar Ghaddafi



• Mu'ammar Al-Qaddafi



• Mohammer Q'udafi

POST SCRIPT: On October 20, 2011 Muammar Qaddafi was captured by rebels in Libya and brutally beaten, tortured, and finally shot at close range in the head. His death ended a 42 year reign as the leader of Libya.

Pentagon Testing New Super Tiny Spy Plane

The next generation of UAV's (unmanned Aerial vehicles) is going to be smaller than ever before. The Pentagon is testing a UAV that will have the size and look of a Hummingbird hence the name "The Hummingbird Project." Instead of having unmanned spy planes that have wingspans of over 100 feet that can be shot out of the sky by potential enemies the Pentagon is thinking that shrinking these spy planes is a better idea. The Hummingbird UAV is only going to weigh about 19 grams. It will have a wingspan of only about 6 inches and it will be designed to look just like a little hummingbird flying in the sky. The smaller size will give it great advantages such as being able to fly into window openings of buildings and it will be a much harder target to shoot out of the sky because it will be much smaller than the current UAV's deployed. It will be able to fly upside down, from side to side, and also hover in the air. The company involved is called Aeroviornment who are working in partnership with the Defense Department. The biggest problem so far with Hummingbird is that it has only been able to stay in flight for about 11 minutes but this is an improvement over the 8 minutes it could only achieve last year in testing. If the project is further developed it can also have civilian surveillance uses in urban environments for law enforcement organizations it is believed.

It Was Machine Over Man In Jeopardy Computer Contest

If you were watching Jeopardy this week you got to see perhaps a preview of what is to come for mankind and his inevitable decline into second place when it comes to the war between man and machine. The show this week featured the two best Jeopardy players in the games history, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, pitted against an IBM computer named "Watson" to see who could end up on top. By the end of the first day of the three day competition it was not a blowout yet. "Watson" had a lead but not an overwhelming one. On the second day "Watson" started to blow the humans away. The computer dominated game two from the start and never let up. By the end of day two the computer had a $30,000 lead over his human rivals. The second day was basically just "Watson" answering all the questions that Alex Trebek put out there while it left the humans in the dust, that's how dominant it was. On the third and final day "Watson" basically kept it up but stumbled a couple of times with wrong answers and that allowed Jennings and Rutter to beef up their totals a little bit but it was still not even close. The final winnings were "Watson" $77,147, Ken Jennings $24,000, and Brad Rutter $21,100. The beat down of the humans was so total that contestant Ken Jennings at one point in the third day scribbled on his computer screen a quote that read: "I for one welcome our new computer overlords." The funniest line that I heard about the show came from late night host Jimmy Kimmel who said of the competition that: "Watson" crushed both guys, gave both of them wedgies, and took away their girlfriends."

U.S. Population Breakdown

The 2010 Census has been taken and the Bureau came up with an official number for the U.S. population of 309,745,538. Here is a closer look at how that number breaks down:

• 155.5 million Americans are male and 151.4 million are female.


• 102.5 million are minorities


• 27% of U.S. population is under 20 years of age.


• 13% are 65 or older.


• Median age is 36.8 years.


• U.S. consists of 4.5% of the entire World population.


• There are twice as many females as males that are aged 85 or older.

The World's 10 Largest Armies

In a dangerous world it is seen by many to be a necessity to have a large army if you are to protect your nation from foreign foes. Some countries take this much farther than others and have expanded their military forces way beyond what any rational observer would consider necessary. The largest army in the world today is the Chinese Army at over 2.3 million active troops. The U.S. is a distant second at 1.6 million. India is third at 1.3 million. Then you have North Korea at 1.1 million, Russia at 1 million, South Korea at 700,000, Pakistan at 620,000, Iran with 520,000, Turkey at 510,000 And last on the list of the top ten is Egypt with just under 470,000. Please note that this list only considered active army troops and did not count any Naval or Air Forces of the countries listed. Even if you were to count those additional forces including their reserves China would still have a big lead at just about 3.5 million total. The U.S. would be at about 2.5 million. Relative to population size however the U.S. army is much larger considering that the U.S. total population is at about 309 million while the Chinese population is north of 1.5 billion.

Gun Violence In The USA

With the recent shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Griffiths, resulting in the deaths of 6 of her constituents, including a 9 year old girl named Christina Green, and the wounding of 13 more, the issue of gun control has come up again. I thought it might be interesting to share a few statistical facts about the number of gun violence victims in the United States in a given year. The following facts and figures come from the CDC (Center for Disease Control) and The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. The Brady Campaign is An organization which is named in honor Of James Brady who was the Press Secretary for President Ronald Reagan on the day of the assassination attempt on Reagan on March 30th, 1981. Mr. Brady was shot in the head on that day and suffered serious brain injuries. The following figures are compiled from statistics gathered over the last few years. The figures are only to do with gun violence and do not include various other types of violence leading to deaths such as knife attacks, beatings, bombings, poisonings or what have you:

More than 100,000 People are shot each year in America by various types of gun violence including murder, assaults, suicides, accidents, or some kind of a police action.

More than 66,000 survive gun violence every year.

More than 32,000 do not survive their gun attacks.

More than 17,000 people commit suicide every year using guns.

More than 12,000 people are murdered every year with guns.

More than 3000 children and teens die each year. Over 2000 of these the result of murder using guns.

More than 600 children and teens kill themselves every year with guns.

More than 600 total individuals are killed accidentally each year by guns.

More than 250 people are shot every day in the United States.

Almost 100 of these shooting victims die every day.

Almost 10 children and teens die every day from gun violence.